Design Lead Design Lead in London

IDEO London is seeking an Interaction Design Lead with a passion for creating human-centred experiences and helping teams do their best work. Your work will span digital and physical experiences, including new ways for people to interact with AI.

We're a global design consultancy where curiosity, empathy, and solving complex challenges drive us. Interaction Design is at the heart of creating meaningful human-centred experiences that meet people's needs and help businesses move forward. As an Interaction Design Lead, you'll bring together craft, creative direction and project leadership to help teams turn strategy into experiences people can use. As AI becomes part of everyday products and services, you'll help us explore how people understand, trust and stay in control of systems that can act on their behalf.

Once Here You Will:

• Lead and co-lead multidisciplinary project teams from research and framing through design, prototyping and delivery, balancing people's needs, client goals and technical possibilities.
• Set a clear design direction and stay hands-on with journeys, flows, interfaces and interaction details, connecting individual touchpoints to a coherent product or service experience.
• Build and guide prototypes at the right fidelity to answer the team's questions, using Figma, code and AI-assisted tools to make ideas tangible early and test them with people.
• Partner with researchers and technologists to plan experiments, test usability and accessibility, and use qualitative feedback and product data to refine designs and assess their impact.
• Explore conversational and agentic UX: design how people express intent, approve actions, understand what an AI system is doing, redirect it and recover when things go wrong.
• Own project plans, resource needs and delivery milestones; brief and delegate work clearly, spot obstacles early, and help the team navigate ambiguity while maintaining creative quality.
• Be a main client point of contact, facilitate working sessions and present compelling design narratives; align stakeholders on decisions, trade-offs and next steps.
• Help scope client challenges and shape proposals and follow-on opportunities with senior colleagues, drawing on project learnings and collaboration across Europe and beyond; travel as projects require.
• Mentor designers, give actionable craft feedback and build an inclusive team culture; share methods and learnings across our London community, including thoughtful use of AI that protects client and participant information.

We're looking for someone with:

• 6–8 years of professional experience in interaction design, digital product design, UX/UI or a related discipline, including 1–2+ years leading projects or multidisciplinary teams.
• Strong interaction design craft and a portfolio showing how you turn complex requirements into clear experiences; advanced expertise in one or more areas of digital, visual, service or systems design, with fluency across others.
• A strong grounding in human-centred design, research and usability testing, with the ability to guide a team from evidence to design decisions and measurable outcomes.
• The ability to scope, brief and delegate design work, manage timelines and resources, and empower a small to medium team to take ownership of different parts of a project.
• A keen eye for visual hierarchy, responsive interfaces, motion and micro-interactions, and the ability to critique work and offer clear, actionable feedback.
• Strong prototyping skills in Figma or comparable tools, and confidence experimenting with AI-assisted ideation and prototyping while checking outputs and making your own design judgements.
• A commitment to accessibility and inclusive design, and thoughtful judgement about privacy, bias and people's agency when designing with AI.
• The ability to connect interaction details to wider service and system needs, and work with engineers to understand technical constraints and bring designs to life.
• Excellent storytelling, presentation and facilitation skills; confidence building trusted client relationships, aligning stakeholders and helping others succeed with empathy and openness.
• An Interaction Design qualification or equivalent work experience, alongside curiosity, self-awareness and a willingness to give and seek feedback.

It's a bonus if you:

• Have worked closely with product managers and engineers to take digital products or services from concept to launch and learn from their use.
• Have used product analytics and experimentation to evaluate design decisions and improve outcomes.
• Have designed conversational or agentic experiences, including human approval, transparent system behaviour, error recovery and hand-offs between people and AI.
• Have built functional prototypes with code or AI coding tools, and can explain where these tools improved your process and where your judgement changed the outcome.
• Have helped shape proposals, scope engagements or develop repeat client work.
• Have contributed to design systems or reusable interaction patterns, or explored emerging technologies through creative experimentation.

What does IDEO offer you?

Dive into a variety of projects from creating breakthrough digital products and experiences, to designing new customer interactions, to building innovation capabilities – working alongside talented individuals across disciplines. Whether it's strengthening your project leadership, deepening your interaction design craft or exploring new technologies, we're here to support your journey.

Community and well-being: Collaboration and community are central to what we do. We foster moments for creativity, connection, and reflection, respecting the need for work-life balance.

Projects with purpose: We partner with clients to use design as a means of realising their purpose and making a positive impact.

Commitment to Diversity: At IDEO, we are committed to the work of advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion within our organisation and in the world. Our purpose of having disproportionate, world-changing impact through design is directly connected to our ability to bring many different perspectives to the table. This applies to our candidates, the people we hire, the clients and customers we serve, and the communities we learn from in our research.

We recognize that this commitment requires ongoing work and sustained attention, as well as adaptation to new insights and best practices.

Application Requirements And Instructions: If you identify with our values, are excited about great design, and would like to contribute to our community, we would love to see your CV, a cover letter and examples of your work.

• CV: please highlight experiences related to the 'We're looking for someone with' and 'It's a bonus if you' sections above.
• Cover letter: please share why you are interested in this role and how it aligns with how you are looking to grow in your career.
• Work examples (confidentiality permitting): please include two projects that show your interaction design craft and project leadership. We'd love to see how you think, make and help a team move forward. In your work examples, focus on:

• The challenge you were trying to solve.
• The context, users and client goals you were designing for.
• Your specific design contribution and how you led or supported the team.
• The research, design and prototyping methods you used, including any AI tools and how you evaluated their outputs.
• Key design decisions, iterations and trade-offs, illustrated with flows, interfaces or prototypes.
• The impact on people, the client and the team, and what you learnt from the outcome.